The door was dashed open, and Brother Karkis entered.
Brother Karkis was no youthful student. He was forty-three, heavy-handed and big-footed, and his voice was the voice of a Great Dane. Born to the farm, he had been ordained a Baptist preacher for twenty years now, and up and down through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Arkansas, he had bellowed in up-creek tabernacles.
His only formal education had been in country schools; and of all books save the Bible, revivalistic hymnals, a concordance handy for finding sermon-texts, and a manual of poultry-keeping, he was soundly ignorant. He had never met a woman of the world, never drunk a glass of wine, never heard a bar of great music, and his neck was not free from the dust of cornfields.
But it would have been a waste of pity to sigh over Brother Karkis as a plucky poor student. He had no longing for further knowledge; he was certain that he already had it all. He despised the faculty as book-adulterated wobblers in the faith—he could “out-pray and out-holler and out-save the whole lot of ’em.” He desired a Mizpah degree only because it would get him a better paid job—or, as he put it, with the 1850 vocabulary which he found adequate for 1905, because it would “lead him into a wider field of usefulness.”
“Say, don’t you fellers ever do anything but sit around and argue and discuss and bellyache?” he shouted. “My lands, I can hear your racket way down the hall! Be a lot better for you young fellers if you’d forget your smart-aleck arguin’ and spend the evening on your knees in prayer! Oh, you’re a fine lot of smart educated swells, but you’ll find where that rubbish gets you when you go out and have to wrestle with old Satan for unregenerate souls! What are you gasbags arguing about, anyway?”
“Harry says,” wailed Eddie Fislinger, “that there’s nothing in the Bible that says Christians have to have a church or preachers.”
“Huh! And him that thinks he’s so educated. Where’s a Bible?”
It was now in the hands of Elmer, who had been reading his favorite book, “The Song of Solomon.”
“Well, Brother Gantry, glad see there’s one galoot here that’s got sense enough to stick by the Old Book and get himself right with God, ’stead of shooting off his face like some Pedo-Baptist. Now look here, Brother Zenz: It says here in Hebrews, ‘Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.’ There, I guess that’ll hold you!”
“My dear brother in the Lord,” said Harry, “the only thing suggested there is an assembly like the Plymouth Brotherhood, with no regular paid preachers. As I was explaining to Brother Fislinger: Personally, I’m so ardent an admirer of the Bible that I’m thinking of starting a sect where we all just sing a hymn together, then sit and read our Bibles all day long, and not have any preachers getting between us and the all-sufficient Word of God. I expect you to join, Brother Karkis, unless you’re one of these dirty higher critics that want to break down the Bible.”